There is a growing trend in the call center industry to support virtual or remote agents. The benefits of virtual or remote agents include the ability to attract higher quality operators, reduced operating and facility costs, access to more potential operators as the operator is no longer tied to a geographic location, better disaster recovery and system redundancy, and the like. The benefits of remote access are being implemented in many large entities for more than call center operation. For example, the Federal Government and many state governments have introduced legislation to encourage telecommuting and in some cases have changed policy to require a certain percent of employees to telecommute.
The trends towards more remote access will likely increase in the coming years with pressures to bring services back to the United States and pressures from increasing fuel prices and the like. Unfortunately, existing infrastructure in the field is inadequate to support the increase in remote access. For example, the infrastructure for remote or virtual call center operations is inefficient, of limited scalability, and costly.
Thus it would be advantageous to develop an improved infrastructure to support remote access.